Overview
Fanatics Live is the live-commerce arm of Fanatics Collectibles, running livestream auctions and “breaks” where buyers watch hosts open sealed product and bid on sports cards and collectibles in real time. It sits inside Fanatics, a multi-billion-dollar company, in a division led by Nick Bell and headed by President Chris Lamontagne. Winston Francois ran the growth marketing team as a full-service partner, owning paid acquisition, ad creative, lifecycle, and tracking.
The mandate:
- Scale paid acquisition across four platforms toward an agreed ceiling of $6,000 in daily spend
- Drive registrations and first purchases into the live-auction funnel
- Stand up the creative, lifecycle, and tracking foundation to support profitable scaling
The challenge
- Acquire and convert buyers for a real-time auction model, where the purchase happens live during a “break” rather than in a standard checkout.
- Keep ad creative in lockstep with a fast-moving “wax” drop calendar and short, inventory-limited release windows.
- Close attribution and tracking gaps, including CSP errors blocking TikTok, AdWords, and GTM tags and funnel dashboards that lagged.
- Prove that efficiency held, or improved, as daily spend ramped toward $6,000 across Meta and Google.
The approach
1. Four-channel paid acquisition at scale
- Managed Meta, Google, Reddit, and Apple Search Ads with daily spend authority up to $6,000 across Meta and Google.
- Optimized campaigns to the real revenue events, web registration and web purchase, layering first open and add-payment signals to train the algorithms.
- Ran daily spend and new-customer tracking in Metabase funnel dashboards, and modeled ramp and deceleration plans platform by platform.
2. A wax-drop creative engine
- Produced ad creative mapped to the release calendar, including Donruss, Topps Diamond, Prizm, and Pokemon waxes plus evergreen concepts such as Trader and the high-value “Whale” line.
- Held a three-day creative rotation SLA to keep fresh assets flighting against each drop.
- Tied creative spend to live inventory, phasing budget out as stock ran low so spend followed availability.
3. Lifecycle and tracking foundation
- Built a “Whales” strategy aimed at the platform's highest-value buyers.
- Executed lifecycle and CRM work alongside the Fanatics team's Braze program.
- Ran a data-collection and pixel-tracking workstream to fix the CSP and tag errors undermining measurement across TikTok, AdWords, and GTM.
The results
| Metric | Change | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Google spend, final 7 days | ↑ 39% | Ramped acquisition budget |
| Google registrations, final 7 days | ↑ 41% | Grew new-account volume |
| Google purchases, final 7 days | ↑ 132% | Purchases scaled more than 3× faster than spend |
| Meta cost per registration, January | $6.17 | 6,592 registrations in the month |
| Meta cost per purchase, January | $8.11 | 5,018 purchases in the month |
| January managed spend | ~$89.9K | Google $44,702, Meta $40,692, Reddit $2,294, Apple $2,224 |
In the closing month, Winston Francois pushed daily spend toward the agreed $6,000 ceiling while efficiency held or improved. On Google, a 39% increase in seven-day spend produced a 41% lift in registrations and a 132% jump in purchases, so purchases grew far faster than budget.
On Meta, the team drove 6,592 registrations at $6.17 each and 5,018 purchases at $8.11 through January. Across Meta, Google, Reddit, and Apple Search Ads, Winston Francois managed roughly $89.9K in media for the month.
What we learned
- On a live-auction model, optimizing to the purchase event itself, not just registration, is what unlocked outsized purchase growth.
- Creative velocity has to match the drop calendar, and tying creative spend to live inventory keeps budget productive.
- Scale and efficiency are not a trade-off when the funnel and tracking are properly instrumented.
- Attribution is foundational: unresolved tag and CSP errors cap how confidently a team can scale spend.